Richard Ramirez Case: Crime Spree, Trial, and Death Row

Richard Ramirez, the serial killer known as the Night Stalker, terrorized California between June 1984 and August 1985, was convicted in 1989 of 13 murders and 30 other felonies, and was sentenced to death in Los Angeles Superior Court. He never faced execution. Ramirez died of cancer on death row at San Quentin State Prison on June 7, 2013, at age 53.¹

The Crime Spree

Ramirez’s first documented murder was the rape and stabbing of 79-year-old Jennie Vincow during a burglary at her Glassell Park home on June 28, 1984.² The attacks escalated sharply in the spring and summer of 1985 and stretched across the greater Los Angeles area and as far north as San Francisco. He entered homes at night, often through unlocked doors or windows, and shot, stabbed, beat, strangled, or sexually assaulted the occupants. Satanic symbols were left at several scenes.¹

On March 17, 1985, Ramirez attacked Maria Hernandez (who survived), killed 34-year-old Dayle Okazaki, and then killed 30-year-old Tsai-Lian Yu the same night. Ten days later he murdered Vincent and Maxine Zazzara in their Whittier home, gouging out Maxine’s eyes.² The 13 people he was ultimately convicted of murdering were:

Jennie Vincow — June 28, 1984, Glassell Park
Dayle Okazaki — March 17, 1985, Rosemead
Tsai-Lian “Veronica” Yu — March 17, 1985
Vincent Zazzara — March 27, 1985, Whittier
Maxine Zazzara — March 27, 1985, Whittier
William Doi — May 14, 1985, Monterey Park
Mabel “Ma” Bell — June 29, 1985, Monrovia
Mary Louise Cannon — July 2, 1985, Arcadia
Joyce Lucille Nelson — July 7, 1985, Monterey Park
Max Kneiding — July 20, 1985, Glendale
Lela Kneiding — July 20, 1985, Glendale
Chainarong Khovananth — July 20, 1985, Sun Valley
Elyas Abowath — August 8, 1985, Diamond Bar³

In August 1985, Ramirez also traveled to San Francisco, where he killed Peter Pan, 66, and his wife Barbara Pan, 64. He was charged with those murders but was never tried for them.⁴ His last known murder occurred on August 24, 1985, followed by a final night of home invasions in Mission Viejo that same evening.²

How Investigators Linked the Killings

The scattered attacks crossed jurisdictions in Los Angeles County, San Bernardino County, Orange County, and San Francisco. Because the methods varied so widely, police initially thought more than one killer was involved.¹ Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide detectives Frank Salerno and Gil Carrillo eventually tied the cases together. Carrillo was the first to identify a pattern connecting the separate home invasions, sexual assaults, and murders, a connection he maintained despite early skepticism from senior colleagues.⁵ After the July 7, 1985, murder of Joyce Nelson, Monterey Park Police Chief Jon D. Elder and Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block established the Night Stalker Task Force.⁶

Two forms of physical evidence linked the scenes. A distinctive footprint from an Avia aerobics shoe first appeared in a flower bed at the Zazzara double murder in Whittier on March 28, 1985, and turned up at five other Los Angeles County scenes over the next four months.⁷ Ballistics also matched across attacks, including the Okazaki, Kneiding, and Pan cases.⁸

The name came from a fingerprint. A witness in Mission Viejo took down the license plate of an orange Toyota station wagon Ramirez had used during his final attacks. Police recovered the stolen car and pulled a single partial print from inside it.⁹ The California Department of Justice was in the middle of installing its new Automated Fingerprint Identification System. AFIS scanned millions of records in minutes and returned Ramirez, who had a prior record from petty crimes, as the top hit. A manual comparison without a suspect’s name could have taken decades.¹⁰

Arrest by a Los Angeles Crowd

On August 30, 1985, authorities released Ramirez’s name and photograph publicly. The next morning, residents in East Los Angeles recognized him. When he tried to steal a car to escape, a crowd surrounded and beat him nearly to death before police pulled him from the mob.⁹

After his arrest, Ramirez made several spontaneous statements to officers, including “Just shoot me,” “I want to die,” and “All the killings are going to be blamed on me.” At the station he said, “I did it, you know… Of course I did it, you know that I’m a killer.”¹¹

The Trial and Death Sentence

Before trial, Ramirez dismissed his public defender and hired two retained attorneys, Daniel Hernandez and Arturo Hernandez, who were not related. Together they had about five years of legal experience and had never handled a capital case.¹² Neither met the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s standards for capital defense, which called for at least 10 years as a California attorney and experience in at least 50 trials.¹³ The trial court held a hearing to make sure Ramirez understood the risks and appointed independent attorney Victor E. Chavez to advise him. Ramirez refused to see Chavez and kept his chosen counsel.¹⁴ In March 1989, the court added experienced attorney Ray G. Clark as co-counsel.

The trial ran roughly 15 months in Los Angeles Superior Court before Judge Michael A. Tynan. Deputy District Attorney P. Philip Halpin led the prosecution, with Deputy District Attorney Alan Yochelson as co-prosecutor. The state’s case rested on similarities across 15 scenes, fingerprint evidence, the Avia shoe prints, ballistics, victim identifications, and Ramirez’s post-arrest statements.¹⁵ The defense argued that eyewitness identifications had been “necessarily tainted” by media coverage and challenged the physical evidence. At his arraignment on October 24, 1985, Ramirez had declared “Hail Satan.”¹¹

On September 20, 1989, a jury of seven women and five men returned a unanimous guilty verdict on all 43 felony counts: 12 counts of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder for the killing of Tsai-Lian Yu, five counts of attempted murder, four counts of rape, three counts of forcible oral copulation, four counts of forcible sodomy, and 14 counts of first-degree burglary. Jurors also found 19 special circumstances true, making Ramirez eligible for the death penalty.¹⁶

The penalty phase lasted one day. Neither side called witnesses. The defense made a tactical decision not to present evidence, even though Daniel Hernandez had traveled to El Paso and interviewed potential witnesses; Ramirez confirmed on the record that he agreed.¹¹ On November 7, 1989, Judge Tynan formally sentenced him to death, remarking that his crimes exhibited “cruelty, callousness and viciousness beyond any human understanding.” Ramirez, who never expressed remorse, replied: “Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”¹

Appeals That Went Nowhere

Ramirez’s conviction and sentence went to the California Supreme Court on automatic appeal. The trial record ran more than 48,000 pages, and the court deliberated roughly two and a half years before ruling on August 7, 2006. In a unanimous opinion by Justice Carlos R. Moreno, the court affirmed on every claim.¹⁷

On the choice-of-counsel claim, the court ruled that because Ramirez had personally requested the Hernandez substitution, he could not now argue on appeal that the trial court should have refused it, particularly since he did not allege ineffective assistance.¹¹ On competency, a pre-trial interview had found him “competent but borderline,” and Justice Moreno wrote that there was “no substantial evidence that defendant was mentally incompetent.” On the crime scene photographs shown to the jury, the court held they “did no more than accurately portray the shocking nature of the crimes.”¹⁷

Ramirez then filed a federal habeas petition in the United States District Court for the Central District of California (Case No. 2:07-cv-08310), docketed in December 2007. The court granted a stay of execution in January 2008. No substantive ruling on the merits was ever issued. The case was terminated on July 17, 2013, shortly after his death.¹⁸

Death on Death Row Without Execution

Ramirez spent more than two decades at San Quentin. He died on June 7, 2013, at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California, after being admitted from San Quentin earlier that week. The cause was complications from B-cell lymphoma; the Marin County coroner noted chronic substance abuse and chronic hepatitis C viral infection as contributing factors. He was 53 and the 59th California inmate to die of natural causes while awaiting execution.¹⁹²⁰

A Later DNA Link Never Charged

In 2009, DNA evidence linked Ramirez to the April 10, 1984, rape and murder of nine-year-old Mei Leung in the basement of a residential hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. A cold-hit match through the Combined DNA Index System connected him to the scene, which had gone unsolved for 25 years. Inspectors served Ramirez a warrant at San Quentin for a confirmation sample. He was never formally charged in the case.⁴

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